I am a long time member of the Crypto community. The ICO is real and I also participated after seeing Sindren's ability during the problem with Vidz.
ICO was announced in a thread of purevidz early.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1696889.msg17949098#msg17949098Because I trusted his ability, ESCROW was not necessary for me.
The investor in other early stages is same, too.
So ICO was sold-out early.
I am not doubting the 75 BTC exists, I am doubting the reason Sindren claimed he didn't use an escrow. He claimed the reason he didn't use an escrow was them over charging him for 10 BTC which we know is simply not true as many escrows are willing to provide their service for much cheaper.
Hello, thank you for taking the time to write such a detailed comment. It has been mentioned in the Slack as well that the complete ANN/Roadmap will not be published until after the launch of the prototype service. After the launch of the prototype the full ANN/Whitepapers will be revealed and translations to over 5 major languages will happen (contributors already lined up)
It is your choice whether you want to consider the ICO legitimate or not. There have been several unique users who have come out in support of the ICO stating that they had participated in it regardless of how brief it was and it was expected knowing Sindren's background.
The topic of security that comes with the ICO process that was used has to do with the recipient Bitcoin ICO address that was assigned to each participant. There are still several million Visio that have not been claimed by ICO participants and the dev wants to wait until all the Visio is claimed before publicly disclosing the receipt addresses so there is no chance that there will be any fraudulent claims on an ICO account (dev is busy full-time with development and does not want to be stressed by anything other than a simple streamlined distribution process).
Can you explain how and why this isn't an issue for any other crowdfund?
You must understand, this is not a silly game where we try to push out as many features as possible in a one or two month time span in order to increase the hype and value. There is a longer term project that consists of several phases.
It is essential to provide tools and basic functions to our userbase regardless of whether other coins in the past have attempted to provide similar features.
When a feature such as encrypted messaging is considered, what may come to your mind if you were a dev would be - 'Which coins are using this? Did their price go up when they revealed the feature? Would my price still go up if I revealed it?
What comes to my mind is the scams and shitcoins that keep trying to slap whatever flashy thing they can into a wallet and claim it's some sort of cutting edge technology.
Maybe you are used to some fancy Roadmap saying 100 things stretching out months into the future. Those who spend more time working and less talking on chatroom all day instead of developing are usually more clandestine and patient.
I'm use to useful milestones being on a roadmap, not things that other projects have done that are entirely open source that can be easily reproduced by referring to their code or copying and pasting it all together.
We are not insecure, we have no reason to go attack other coins regardless of the flaws they have in their propositions or in their origins. We know what is going to happen in the coming weeks and soon you will simply be astounded at the amount of traction and support that the Visio project receives.
You are going to be pretty surprised at whats going to come, I can assure you that. How difficult do you think metadata retrieval and indexing with a corresponding IPFS hash is?

How difficult do I think it is? Pretty trivial given the code for it is already open source
https://github.com/coinspark/php-OP_RETURNhttps://github.com/stolendata/rpc-ace